RSS
Home
How can I tell you Sony's literary twitter Words Move Me is horrible in less than 140 characters?
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Site of the crime. Wordplay!
I read this WaPo article on Sony's literary twitter and thought, "huh." Words Move Me has the tagline "connecting readers around the literary moments they love." Consider me unconnected and unmoved.
I went to the website, created a screen name (bill_grolic, same as my twitter handle), and waited to see all the great quotes from classics, contemporary, and unknowns.
And I waited. Nothing was coming up. After a few more minutes, a box came up with a quote. Finally! What did it say? Shakespeare? Homer? James Patterson? No, it was Coffee Stories: Crowdsourced Stories from Amazon's Mechanical Turk by Lifebushido. I googled it, and not only is it unknown, the quotes were boring, and it's not even a book yet.
Then I started writing this article. Since then a few actual good quotes, some Nietzche and Joyce, have appeared, along with Chuck Norris quotes (what is this 2003?) and a Bugs Bunny children's book (author unknown). Whatever Sony is trying to launch, people aren't buying into. Which leads to the general errors with this type of copycat site:
- Twitter is all about fast. For words move me you have to fill out a form, title, author, and even three tags. It takes too long, twitter is not a form, imagine the annoyance of trying to fill out a form on a smart phone. How is this better (read: quicker) than the real Twitter? It's not.
- You can also see three quotes at a time. And the blocks of quotes are clunky. And even if the quote is small (i.e. one woman wrote "NMIND", unknown title by unknown), the words are giant. And their feet smell and they bite their finger nails when they're nervous.
- Tags. These are just silly and stupid. They say: "Tag your entry with at least one emotion that describes how this literary moment makes you feel." I just can't see people clicking on a tag because they want other "depressing" or "inspiring" lines from books. Also people are using them like they would usually use a tag, by tagging the name of the author or the title of the book, completely rendering the tags unnecessary.
I know this may be picking on a site that just launched this week (and every site is going to have spam to some degree). But the design doesn't seem appealing, they missed the whole "fast" and "accessible" part of the Internet, and they aren't even asking the right questions when they are asking you to further explain. I'd like to see a fun literary twitter site, or you know, just stay on twitter.
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
